Blog: More cars on the road, clean or not, means more microplastics
When Governor Gavin Newsom announced that all new car sales in California would be zero-emission vehicles by 2035, many activists celebrated the move. … But there was a word few people mentioned in response to the news: microplastics. One of the potential unintended consequences of the transition to electric vehicles could be more microplastics. When rubber meets road, tires shed small synthetic polymers less than five millimeters in diameter. … “We ended up estimating that stormwater was discharging about seven trillion [microplastics] into the [San Francisco] Bay annually,” said Rebecca Sutton, a senior researcher at the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI). Half of those particles come from tires. … These tire particles are already in the air we breathe as well as the San Francisco Bay and the groundwater that empties into it.